I started to make myself a shopping list of all the bits and pieces that I wanted (motors, controllers, lead screws, bearings, spindle etc etc) and the total price is.... completely unrealistic!!!!!
Plan B... can I make this for next to nothing?
I stripped down an old inkjet printer to see what I could use... conclusion... not much :(
Plan C... try to buy a small number of key parts to allow me to build something sensible.
The one section that I couldn't work around was the set of motors and drivers.
Clearly these were going to use up a significant part of my budget so I wanted to ensure that I had at least enough torque this time... in the end I went for Nema23 425oz motors and a 36V 350W PSU with micro stepper controllers.
Excitedly I downloaded the trial version of Mach3 and plugged it all into to the parallel port on my old laptop. The motors jumped on power-up and then sat there not doing much.... a few tentative movements but not much else.
I read the Mach3 info including statements about not using a laptop (due to the power saving features if I'm correct).
Several discussions later and indeed the conclusion was.... don't use a laptop!
Since my fastest non-laptop was a Pentium 2, it was time to hit the second hand market for an old PC. I found a great looking Dell and rushed round to pick it up.
Next problem - no parallel port!!!! AGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!
A few days later a PCI LPT card appeared through the post and..... it
works!!!!
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